Nobel Peace Prize Winners visualisation using Tableau

It’s possible to interact directly with Tableau workbooks using Tableau Public, which is probably best described as a ‘Youtube’ for data. This means that viewers are no longer passive consumers of data visualisations. Instead, data consumers are turned into active, interactive data consumers who can visually navigate their way, slicing intuitively through their data sets in order to make strategic decisions based on data and fact.

I’ve made use of Tableau Public here in order to try and ‘practise what I preach’ with respect to data. In other words, that data visualisations should be fluid enough for navigation, and robust enough to withstand scrutiny. Click on the image in order to go to the relevant page at Tableau Public:

This particular image shows the sex of the Nobel Peace Prize winner as male, female or ‘N’, which represents an institution. If you go to the Tableau Public site, you can play with the worksheet and see where the male/female/institutions have earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

As in the case of a previous blog, most of the countries had up-to-date names apart from the following:

Burma – is now Myanmar

Tibet – contentious

Russia – should be the ‘Russian Federation’

Palestine – contentious

If Tableau does not recognise the country, then it assigns it as a Null value and it appears in the ocean. This occurs with Tibet. There is a debate over whether Tibet is independent of China, and I am afraid I cannot answer that here. However, since the Dalai Lama is a peaceful man, in my opinion, I could not find it in my heart to represent him as anywhere else other than Tibet; so I’m afraid I’ve left it as a Null value in order to highlight it.

If this was Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services, we could make the most of the geographic and geometrical points stored in SQL Server 2008 R2; this would remove the obstacle around the political associations with naming countries since we would simply have an absolute point in a map. More on this on later blogs!